Started last night with The Burning (1981), a very good summer camp slasher movie I hadn't seen before. For some reason, it didn't get the same exposure as some of the other slashers back in the day. I hadn't even heard of it until recently.

Good movie with the standard formula. Five years earlier, a group of campers play a prank on the camp's creepy, sadistic caretaker. It goes wrong, and he ends up horribly burned. Jump forward to a new group of campers, and their silent stalker. This one had a lot of T&A, as well as sex talk, even by the standards of the genre. The girls are constantly finding reasons to undress, while the boys spend a significant amount of time looking at porn and talking about jacking off. Typical collection of one-note teenage characters, including a very young Jason Alexander, about a decade before Seinfeld. Still, the movie delivers good tension and scares, and quite a bit of blood and gore, courtesy of Tom Savini.

Overall, one of the better examples of the slasher subgenre. I liked it.

Started out with Friday the 13th (1980). Some counselors go to Camp Crystal Lake to help renovate the cabins before the actual campers arrive. The place is kind of run down because it's been closed for 20 years due to a few murders that took place...this does not bode well for our current staff. I'm a big fan of the Friday the 13th franchise but this first entry is one of the weakest in my opinion. You don't get to know the characters well enough to really care about what happens to them, and the last third of the movie really drags. Heck the climax even drags. It's got some nice atmosphere out in the dark woods at least. I actually enjoyed it a bit more last night than I have when I've watched it previously. 3.5/5.

Logged

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy...But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

I watched The Invisible Man yesterday. Simply amazing special effects considering it was made in 1933 and still holds up today. The documentary goes into how they they did it. To be blunt it's a classic.

Logged

Kubrick, Nolan, Hitchcock, Tarantino, Wan - the elite

I believe in the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

I should get my hands on a copy of House. Been a long time since I last saw that one.

Tonight, I watched Blood Hook (1986). Saw it on VHS years ago, and felt like giving it another watch. Probably the most noteworthy thing about this movie is that its director, Jim Mallon, and key grip, Kevin Murphy, went on to do Mystery Science Theater.

A homicidal angler is snagging unsuspecting victims off docks and out of boats during a weekend-long muskie fishing tournament in Wisconsin, and it ties back to the disappearance of a character's grandfather 17 years earlier. It's a low-budget slasher flick with its share of cheesy effects, hokey dialogue and goofy performances, but it also offers a bit of a different twist on the slasher formula, and it's quite engaging. The killer's identity is pretty well concealed by an abundance of hostile, creepy and generally weird characters. The characters themselves are surprising, in that some of them start as one-note cliches, but actually develop some depth, and end up playing a different part in the story than you might expect at first. Overall, pretty good for what it is.

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) - pretty much the same plot as the first movie; counselors show up at summer camp a few days before the campers arrive and a psycho killer slaughters them. I liked this a lot better than the first. The characters are a bit more developed and I actually cared about them (a little) and didn't want to see them get killed. And a lot more is going on in this one, it's not just people sitting around doing nothing until it's their turn to die. And Jason makes a far more frightening killer than some 50 year old woman. Overall it's a fun slasher, one of my all-time favorites. 4.5/5.

Friday the 13th Part III (1982) - another fun entry in the franchise. This time it's a group of kids going to a cabin, which I'm assuming is somewhere in the vicinity of Crystal Lake. Once again the characters are fun and likable (especially Tracie Savage in that unforgettable blue bikini). There's a cheesy 3-person biker gang who gets their just rewards courtesy of Jason, and this was originally released in 3-D so there's tons of stuff getting thrust in the direction of the camera, which lends a certain retro charm. The last girl is actually surprisingly resourceful which makes for a much more satisfying climax. 4.5/5.

Logged

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy...But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

American Gothic (1988)-Directed by John Hough (The Legend of Hell House) and shot in beautiful British Columbia this is a creepy little movie that kept me entertained. When 6 teens are stranded on an island they decide to do a little camping before discovering that a very strange family resides on the island. The family consists of Rod Steiger, his wife and their three "children" who are fully grown and fully disturbing looking.

I liked this one for a couple reasons. Firstly the island location was well used with some pretty good camerawork. Next the creepy family is really well done, I fully believed that the three "children" have some kind of mental issues/deficiencies in real life which added to the effect of the film. Rod Steiger gets to chew up the scenery as the father and is probably the most memorable performance here.

As for what didn't work I would say they could have spent some more time on the kills in this movie but I would guess that was more of a budget issue. Overall I have enjoyed all three movies I have watched this month (Return of the Living Dead 3, Amityville 2 and this one) I don't know if that means these are good films or that I just have extremely low critical standards for my horror films. Regardless I am enjoying checking out these flicks and will likely watch one or two more today.

Sadly enough, it is not a movie about a Zombie's diary. That would have been much more entertaining. (Dear Diary, today I found a ground of people held up in a farm house. I just wanted to come in and say "hello" but it came out more as "braaaiiinnnnnssss,". Then they shot me in the leg, the jerks, so I ate their baby.) Instead it's a movie where some guy has a camera and records the zombie outbreak.

So, yeah, it's one of those shaky camera held by the character films, you know they type, the ones that pass bad camera work and being unable to tell what's going on as a feature instead of a mistake. I've never cared for that stuff. The movie makers this time decide to spice things up by randomly having the film quality go horrible and distorted, which might have been a nice gimic if it was consistent instead of it just happening randomly then going back to the normal perfect film. Oh, and also sometimes they decide to just skip the hand held camera stuff and film it like a normal movie.

What else can I say abut it? Hmm... none of the characters are likeable or memorable, that includes the zombies, and the box art has absolutely nothing to do with the movie.

Logged

Terms & Conditions: By reading this signature, you, the reader willfully acknowledge that you owe me a dollar.

Movie 4The Black Cat (1981)This movie by lucio fulci is loosely based on the edgar allan poe story. Instead it is mainly based on close up eyes of the main stars (the cat). The story is pretty much nonsense and I had trouble paying attention to it throughout. Some alright cat attacks, but this film should have been much gorier than it was. The cat attacks are pretty repetitive and by about 45 minutes in when you've seen 10,000 close ups of the freakin things eyes, you will just want it to go away. Probably the worst movie I have seen from lucio so far.